The Uglysuit

Who: Six-piece Oklahoma City indie pop band the Uglysuit, who went from opening for the All-American Rejects and the Roots to headlining their own packed CMJ showcase.

Sounds Like: Bound by no genre, the sextet jump from from Brit-pop-style ballads like "Happy Yellow Rainbow" to atmospheric, jazz-tinged explorations on "Brownblue's Passing" to gorgeous piano-powered anthems like "Chicago" on their self-titled debut album.

Vital Stats:

• Led by frontman Israel Hindman, the group met at their Christian school and got their start playing in church bands before Hindman began fronting screamo and hardcore bands. "It was just a stage in our life. But eventually we just wanted to go from playing fast punk to really touching people's hearts," Hindman says.

• While the sextet is still in touch with their deeply-religious roots, the rock star life has slightly corrupted Hindman. "Smoking is a wonderful thing," Hindman says about his occasional joint. The band still participates in pre-gig prayer circles before most shows.

• As for their poorly dressed band name: "We've always enjoyed dressing in ugly suits from thrift stores," says Hindman. "Everyone tells us we look like old men. We figured why not just go out front with the idea?"

Hear It Now: The Uglysuit, the band's nine-song debut album, is available now. In the meantime, click above for acoustic performance of "Chicago." - Rollingstone

It makes sense that the members of Oklahoma City's the Uglysuit are all in their very early 20s. After all, on their debut album they play dreamy pop with a kind of stone-faced earnestness that only the very young possess. And like other short-in-the-tooth bands, they've yet to establish their own identity and instead blatantly borrow from their predecessors. Remember that semester when you went punk or grew a beard or started dressing solely in Goodwill polyester, and your new "look" briefly became your new personality? In much the same way, the Uglysuit spend most of their self-titled album trying on musical guises, perhaps as a way to suss out what kind of band they'd like to be.

The jangle and washed-out harmonies of tracks like "Brownblue Passing" suggest that Uglysuit are comfortable with territory already well-worn by the Shins, while "...And We Became Sunshine" features frontman Israel Hindman's eerily uncanny Conor Oberst imitation. Despite being so familiar, both songs are still charming in a wistful, glassy-eyed kind of way. "Chicago", with its glossy keyboard, soaring chorus, and plaintive vocals, is the collection's most accessible track, sounding like an updated, echo-laden version of the Counting Crows' "Long December". Instrumental interlude "Elliot Travels" feels at first like an out-of-place piano fantasia on an already short album. But when combined with the vertigo-inducing carnival "Anthem Of The Arctic Birds" that follows, it suggests that the band's truest influence is those delightful weirdoes from their hometown, the Flaming Lips.

Two of the nine tracks expand beyond the seven-minute mark, and it's when the Uglysuit stretch out that they seem to be having the most fun. "Everyone Now Has a Smile" and the aforementioned "...And We Became Sunshine" could use stronger hooks to anchor their crashing, psychedelic orchestrations, but they're still enjoyable and infused with a confidence lacking on the rest of the album.

The Uglysuit are certainly competent, but on this debut their music feels too by-the-book. Where are the surprises? With nothing unexpected and without a distinct musical personality of their own, the band feels too much like an indie-rock Frankenstein's monster, a creature born in the lab of a music supervisor for the CW. Their debut is perfect for soundtracking that bittersweet breakup on "Gossip Girl" or "One Tree Hill", but alone on a stereo, devoid of visual accompaniment, it's ultimately kind of empty. Which brings us back to the band's youth. The Uglysuit in a sense feels like a freshman survey class of modern indie, covering all the biggies (from Bright Eyes to Wilco) but failing in the details. They have potential, though, so here's hoping the Uglysuit graduate soon. - Pitchfork

July 25, 2008 - The debut, self-titled album from Oklahoma City-based band The Uglysuit is refreshingly bright, with huge, spirit-raising, piano and guitar anthems. The group mixes artful dream pop with a few alt-country flavors (lead singer Israel Hindman's voice mimicks Jeff Tweedy one minute, Conor Oberst the next), and has been compared to the Flaming Lips and the Shins. But the grandiosity of The Uglysuit's music has space rock proportions.

Much of the album consists of slow build-ups to epic, wall-of-sound climaxes. "Brad's House" opens with a few simple piano chords, but evolves into a huge chorus of soaring, reverb-heavy vocals. "Everyone Now Has a Smile" comes to a rousing finish with a sea of swirling melodic guitar lines set against a gospel style organ. Ironically, "Happy Yellow Rainbow" is the most raucous track on the album, degrading into a thick mix of loud, clashing guitars — tension that is released in the sweet piano melody of the closing track, "Let It Be Known."

"Chicago" stands as the most immediately accessible track on the album, as well as its most country-influenced, at least at the outset. The song finds Hindman's somber vocals echoing Elliot Smith, but when the music kicks in with rock pianos for the sing-along chorus, the radiant, dreamy sound begins to remind the listener of Brit-pop band, Travis.

Of the six members of The Uglysuit, four have been playing together since their early teens. "Around when we were 12 or 13 we got instruments," explains guitarist Colin Bray, whose brother Crosby is the band's drummer. Bray says the childhood friends, now in their early 20s, got serious about music early on. "We all realized that music is what we wanted to do and wanted no part of the corporate world when we were around 15." The band went through periods of playing a number of different genres including punk and harder rock with "lots of screaming" before finding their sound. "Thank god we got out of that," Bray says. - NPR

Facts about this album;

‘Chicago’ was written before The Uglysuit were officially a band.

The Uglysuit participate in pre-gig prayer circles before most shows.

The inspiration for The Uglysuit's name is quite literal: "We've always enjoyed dressing in ugly suits from thrift stores," says lead singer Israel Hindman."

Album review:

A doe-eyed 20-something climbs sadly aboard a departing Greyhound bus; Zach Braff waves despondently from the kerb, as music swells in picturesque melancholy. It sounds a bit like Oklahoma’s The Uglysuit, whose country-prog-post-rock-indie-orchestral ramblings recall, variously, Wilco, Bright Eyes, The Shins, Elbow, Ryan Adams, My Morning Jacket and the soundtrack for every emotionally self-indulgent US drama ever made. Yet, hearing the warm country musings of ‘Chicago’ or the aching two-note piano motif of ‘…And We Became Sunshine’, it’s hard not to settle into the seduction. Then, before you know it, you’ve watched the entire first series box set and it’s 3.40am. Damn. Emily Mackay
- NME

The Uglysuit’s debut, eponymously-titled album is the sonic equivalent of a trip to the amusement park, one of those old-timey ones that has a sense of sweetness and charm to it, populated with paddleboats and lovingly crafted carousel horses, all accentuated by the sweet taste of cotton candy melting in your mouth. The thrill rides are there, but there’s a sort of wonder surrounding the less bombastic contraptions. On the surface, it seems so simple. But when you pause to think about it, there’s an almost magical quality to how even the simplest of amusements, the way the parts work together, is a surprisingly complex enterprise.

A sextet of musically inclined friends hailing from Oklahoma City, it’s hard to liken the Uglysuit’s sound to anyone else. Sure, there are snippets of other bands that creep in for just the briefest of moments. Despite their Midwestern roots, the band could easily be mistaken as Euro- or Brit-pop with their gauzy, ethereal sound. At times, the band seems somewhat Beatles-esque with its multi-layered arrangements and traces of John Lennon’s optimism in their abstract, yet hopeful lyrics. On the other hand, tracks like “Brad’s House” channel the Killers at their most mellow, starting off with a sparse soundscape that eventually builds towards the entire band singing along on the piece’s starry-eyed coda. There might even be a dab of Coldplay somewhere in the mix, too, owed to a piano-heavy sound and pieces containing multiple, cinematic movements. But these vague resemblances only show up from time to time. Unless you’re really desperate to find some predecessor to compare the group to, these elements are hard to pinpoint.

On the disc’s single, “Chicago”, and at various points throughout, Israel Hindman’s vocals are an odd combination of monotone and melodic, employing very few dynamics. That said, monotone does not necessarily translate to soulless. When Hindman does make with the rare display of vocal pyrotechnics, the results are all the more stunning. The emotional factor isn’t a railing tour de force, but more of a quiet display. Then again, you don’t need the overt sap of a Hallmark card to convey genuine feeling… and the Uglysuit proves it.

There is a singer-songwriter quality to The Uglysuit that stems from the band’s tranquility. Unlike the bare-bones, often anemic sounds peddled by singer-songwriters, prone to their fits of acoustic maudlin on a lone guitar or with droning piano chords, the Uglysuit is beefed up by its six members contributing to an astonishingly full sound. Each one tackles double-duty on more than one instrument on the album.

Rhythm guitar jangles side-by-side with floaty piano chords, often playing in tandem and giving the Uglysuit an unobtrusively lush sound. Instead of competing for the spotlight, the instruments gel together. The lead guitar doesn’t so much riff as twinkle. Pleasant acoustic arpeggios sparkle before an echoing, wordless chorus of harmony on “…And We Became Sunshine”, stretching it out into a seven-minute opus that slows itself down with a monstrous stop.

One of the most remarkable things about the Uglysuit’s debut is that for a bunch of guys between 20 and 23 years of age, the arrangements are more ambitious than those of a lot of seasoned musicians. The songs expertly flow into one another, particularly on the latter half of the disc’s nine songs. Jonathan Martin gets an opportunity to show off his piano skills on the solo “Elliot Travels”, a pleasant interlude that leads into the stunning “Anthem of the Arctic Birds”, with its in-the-round chorus and lyrical themes of birds soaring through the air for the first time. As “Anthem” glimmers to a close, “Everyone Now Has a Smile” picks up on the faint guitar noodlings before roaring into what is perhaps the closest the band comes to indie-rock riffing.

Make no mistake about it, The Uglysuit is a comfort album. Everything about it feels warm and fuzzy, like a cherished memory or favorite sweater. It’s not gonna shake your walls or rattle your cage. At times, all the sweetness and light can be a bit repetitive. But for a first outing, The Uglysuit does serve as a much more quiet sort of inspiration—which, sometimes, can be quite profound. - PopMatters